AustLit

'It is time to repent my sins. Recently, I have been asking myself if poetry is exempt from a need to entertain. Is the act of reading a poem or a book of poetry an escapist, amusing, joyous diversion from the rigours of reality? Or is it something more tedious, cold-blooded, blandly intellectual – an act not of enjoyment, but of control and imposition?'  (Introduction)

'Both Adam Aitken’s Archipelago and Elizabeth Allen’s Present examine the establishment and mutability of identity in the worlds of objects, histories, literature, and media in which they place their speakers. Of course, the exploration of identity is a common theme of poetry, particularly as it pertains to how the material of language helps shape such a tenuous concept. Admittedly, the theme serves primarily as a useful frame through which to enter two starkly different works. All the same, Aitken and Allen’s books prove rewardingly immersive and surprisingly complex in the different ways in which they handle their speakers’ desire for understanding in the crowded spaces of their poetry.'(Introduction)

'I am always struck by the immense variability of human experience; the little and big differences that amount to the conditions of our individual and collective identities. The task of poetry is to write this nebulous, subjective humanity, while also probing the inefficiencies of the language we have to create and understand something so frustratingly out of grasp. How to apply an ostensibly tangible tool to an intangible quality? For instance, if we write emotion, or an emotion, as a word, it becomes incased in the materiality of language, becomes material itself, and is removed from the intangibilities of its initial feeling. Feeling is of course still there, but its nuance is limited to the shape and familiarity of the word, to the different ways we know the word in our different real world encounters.' (Introduction)